


Thaw

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Bonding, Crying, F/M, Jealousy, Kylo ren's backstory, Love/Hate, Mind Meld, Possessive Behavior, Rey's first kiss!, Romance, The Force, Violence, finn/Rey if you squint, wet dreams
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 17:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 17,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5506751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren accidentally discovers the Force bond he has with Rey, and now he can't live without her. However, Rey fully intends to return to her friends and rejoin the Rebel Allegiance. This is an issue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The girl is not like Poe Dameron.

The assuredness of the pilot’s stride, the rakish jaunt to his mouth, all had represented everything that Kylo Ren despises about the rebellion. He’d greatly enjoyed Dameron’s face after the interrogation, the look in his eyes when he _knew_ ; Pity he’d gotten away.

This one won't.

He’s crouched down by the foot of the rack, watching the swell and fall of her chest as she breathes, still in the clutches of his force-sleep. He’d heard so much about her, her name suddenly threading its way into this life over the past few days. Uttered by many mouths in high places, spat out by Hux, whimpered by the cowering officer whose life he took. He’s heard much, but knows this for certain: she is a good pilot, and she is less aggravatingly resilient when she is unconscious.

 

He watches her and listens to the dull thrum of cooled air the chamber’s vents, a caustic type of anticipation twisting in his gut that makes his feet dance, his stomach churn. He can still feel the warmth of body against his chest and biceps where he’d carried her. He’d been right behind the troopers who had taken her off the ship and into the interrogation chambers, the Force around him palpably taut; the crewmembers unfortunate enough to be milling around the shuttle bay had known enough to part quickly.  

When she awakes, he approaches her with Hux’s sneering face behind his back, Snoke’s breath on his neck. He approaches her with purpose.

She’s watching him with a heavy gaze. But that's all she can do, stare; She’s uncomfortably tensed up against the steely grip of the rack in a way that Ren thinks he should relish, but admits that he can’t manage. He halts to shudder, watching her and repeating dogmatic mantras in any tongue he can remember, as if he could implode that last resilient kernel of mercy by way of willpower alone. But she just looks so out of place, sick, dimmed down by being cloistered up in the bowels of this artificial planet. He’d be the last to admit it out loud, but it almost hurts to watch this beautiful, burn-bright thing be so thoroughly tamped low. She’s no Dameron; whether it’s sad or satisfying to watch her wriggling under his thumb like this, he’s indecisive.

Then she calls him a monster, cajoles him to take his helmet off, and for some reason he can’t name, he does. The mask hits the ground with a clang. Now, with no mask in the way, there’s no denying that she’s a pretty thing, rough spun and sun-kissed to the sleek metal of him, the room they’re in.

He can’t gauge her reaction to his naked head. It doesn’t matter, though; even if he can’t decipher her face, her mind is something he’s much more adept at reading.

He reaches out with the force, honing the edge of his mind to a needle-sharp tool for extraction, and pushes into the nebulous cloud of the girl’s consciousness, pressing her skull back into unyielding metal of the headrest.

But it’s difficult— _why is it hard?_

In the next moment, Ren remembers a sensation he hasn’t known in years: Falling without pretense. Terror.

Then he’s inside and it’s a little like staring into the sun.

She’s brilliant and he’s far, far too preoccupied to find the map he’s looking for. She’s Rey, begat of sand and hard labor and hunger. He watches her crawl inside the ATAT, studies how she made a home in the hollow relic and picked over hulking metal skeletons of his father’s time. He tastes her mealy rationed bread as he watches it rise from the foam, thousands of times, over and over, once for every one of those little silver lines she patiently keeps. She’s Rey, and she’s homesick for a place Ren knows she’s never been.

An unexpected, overwhelming sense of _completeness_ suffuses him because now he’s known her for his whole entire life. He knows the history of her, each piece of scar tissue, each sunburn, the texture of her gentleness. She is _warm_. He’s conscious of the fact that he’s stumbling, nauseous with the shift in his personal gravity. Nothing is holding him down anymore but Rey, and it’s disorienting. This all is kriffing weird and far too much at once but he’s fallen to his knees with the weight of it. Ren smells sweat, rust, the perfection of her, and the ache smacks of— _love_? No, she’s pulled him from his lonely orbit so effortlessly that the idea of love doesn’t encompass nearly enough. He’s vaguely aware that the force must have a hand in this, but can’t bring himself to do much more than weather this utter tilt in axis from the floor.

He’s shivering in a notion with every follicle and fiber: he is inexorably tied to her.

The back of his head tips into the wall with a _thump_.

No, she’s no Dameron.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bruh.... i rewrote the whole thing and then my edits got deleted.... come on bruh.........  
> here's pretty much what should be going in the first chapter since this is no longer a oneshot


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey explores her half of the bond.

Rey guts him; there’s not really any other way to describe how brutally she explores her half of their fledgling bond. Ren’s just crouched there on the floor of the chamber, body language of his curled back and trembling hands steeped in vulnerability. Pathetic. With the memories of a girl he’s never met coursing through him, his strength as a Sith means literally nothing. Prying open her mind had left him more weakened than he’d been in years since— _a path better left alone_ , he reminds himself. He makes to stand, robes weighing on him as if he was rising, soaked, from the sea, dark curls falling in his face. Their light touch is a peculiar sensation, not one that he gets to experience often. It reminds him how naked he is to her, expressions left plain to see. Most of the time he can get away with pouting around his subordinates (though he’d never call it that, of course), and even curling his lip at Hux, because the mask affords him the privacy. He thinks of Vader’s commanding presence to compose his expression.

Rey’s still strapped up on the rack with the interrogation droid standing by, looking every part a prisoner, but she’s studying him with curiosity, not cruelty. Ren isn’t surprised by this show of gentleness and that’s—that’s kriffing weird, too. He’s learned that a life of relentless grit has made her fierce, but mellowed in odd spots. She’s not wanton in her violence, like him.

He moves as close to her as he dares, until he’s at her side and watching his own hand reach out to cup her face. Her head twitches away for a second, but she lets him touch her.

No, she’s not like him at all. She’s…perfect. His gloved thumb and forefinger splay on either side of her left eye, and the innate heat of her skin hums under his fingertips. Her irises are laced with a corona of gold and Ren is certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there’s not a single being on this man-made planet that has eyes like hers.

Then she’s reaching down his red throat, squeezing his heart, and he’s never experienced something so violating in his life. The sensation is so real and so painful that he’s surprised she hasn’t done just that, miraculously slipped out of her restraints to strangle him from the inside out. It’s a feeling akin to the scald of drinking something hot much too fast, but pervasive throughout his person, mind and body. And it’s building.

In this moment, he’s no longer Sith—just the sound of that word slips off the human tongue like a sliver of ice, speaks of lunar barrenness and cold. Now, his heart pumps molten and his neurons fire like sparks; every vessel, every synapse, has been made incendiary by Rey’s all encompassing need to know him in his entirety.

He wrenches his hand back to grasp at his chest, a scream clinging to the roof of his mouth.

Surprisingly, she cries out in his place.

“Augh!”

It’s the first time he’s heard her voice. Her face is twisted tightly into her neck with eyes clenched shut. At first, Ren has no idea what’s going on – in fact, a small part of him finds it a bit selfish that she’s the one screaming while he’s actually putting _quite a bit_ of effort into not collapsing (again) to the floor. But then, on top of his own overwhelming agony, he notices pain radiating from one of her eyes, and comes to realize that he might have been the one to poke her in said eye. Ah.

But it’s too late for an apology; smarting eye aside, she’s reached right into him, rifled through the blackest matter of his mind, and come out with a victorious handful. Force, Rey is _strong_. Even with the context of her life story as a map, he’s lost; he has no idea where this savagely formidable power came from. 

He feels the seed of his deepest shame in her, unfolding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Alicia Keys voice* This Sith is on FIYYAAAAAA
> 
> Hey don't pay any attention to tonal shift! Why on earth would you do that??


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's end of things.

Waking up in bonds isn’t the most pleasant sensation, but Rey knows she’s been in worse. She rehearses a check as old as time, not unlike how she’d run systems before takeoff, the steady assurance of a functioning vessel forcing her to slow her breathing.

Body intact – Check. Reasonably unwounded – Check. She opens her eyes: Creepy Sith lord watching her every move – yes, that too. Like so much she’s encountered in these past few days, this man is just a cobbled together string of mismatched understandings. He’s boss around here, she gets that much. He’d advanced through her blaster rays like drops of rain, made the very air around her a vice from which she couldn’t escape. Something about vengeance in his voice, dogged purpose in his stride. The red-hot hum and spit of his jagged ‘saber blade, teasing at the space above her collar bone.

When he notices that she’s awake, he nearly jumps to his feet; Rey wonders how long he’d been waiting there, crouched at the foot of the interrogation rack. Her muscles ache a bit from being pinned at the wrists and ankles—probably a while, then.

He says she’s nothing more than a scavenger, scoffs in her face, as if the idea of her being so intimately tied up in the fate of mythological names like _Skywalker_ and _Solo_ is so ridiculous it warrants a good laugh. She doesn’t disagree; she’d been tempted to have a private, hysterical cackle more than a few times in the past couple of hours alone. Little desert rat with no more bolt-holes left to hide in. She runs with the big dogs now.

 

Everything is so chrome and cold in space, but Rey feels everything get just the tiniest bit warmer once Ren takes his helmet off, possibly because of the paltry comfort of knowing she’s not the only human on the planet. Of all of the strangeness she’s encountered off Jakku, most surprising to her is the fact the Sith is actually willing to place himself in such a vulnerable position, to stoop for her.

Second most surprising is that Kylo Ren isn’t bad to look at. At all. He’s no holovid star—from the few she’d caught snippets of over the years, at least. Face a little too long, not symmetrical enough for that. But it’s a face that’s heartwrenchingly real, that broods with a total effort, brow and eyes and lips and chin heavy with it. Pale from a life in a mask and away from the sun, but he’s certainly far from the diseased cave-creature she expected. Interesting.

 

When he pushes into her mind she feels like she’s fighting him off with a staff made of air, each blow meaningless and increasingly frantic in intensity. Further and further into he goes, deeper even than when she’d crawl into the claustrophobic, maze-like hearts of star ships, desperate for a piece of scrap.

All at once there’s a cessation of the unyielding, inward pressure and Rey is aware of Ren gasping above her, pulling away violently.

Where before he was so static and composed, now he’s gone to pieces, backed up into the corner with hair an inky nest, eyes wide and wild; Whatever he found down there, she thinks it must have been awful.

He finally rises after a few stunned seconds, breathing hard, and Rey sees that his eyes are somehow darker than before and there’s a bit of a sheen, like they’re wet. Is he… crying? She can’t quite piece it all together, this man’s chest heaving like a beast all in black, but face looking for all the world like an overwhelmed child.

Then something even more confusing happens: the sad space-boy cups her face in his hand in a way that nobody has before.

Like she’s precious.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> literally wrote this shit at 3 in the morning after watching TFA for a second time tonight. worth it


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey learns more about Kylo Ren's history.

The same gloved hand that had been quivering outstretched with the intent to _take_ only a minute before now rests on her skin with gentleness, leather kissing coolly against the shell of her ear, her cheekbone. Ren’s brow is deeply furrowed, as if he’s equally confused by his sudden change. What a strange, strange man, she thinks, given the mantel of leadership despite being so intrinsically governed by emotion. He’d die on Jakku, she’s certain of that. The necessity of desiccating the humanity of oneself, of ignoring all emotion but fear, was something she learned young. Tears were just wasted moisture, evaporated off skin by greedy sand. Long ago she stopped letting the desert steal even that from her, after it had already taken so much.

But here he is, crying, and Rey aches in her bonds with the bone-deep frustration of knowing that she’s back where she’s always truly been: trapped. Always pinioned into codependence; this is Unkar Plutt all over again, the feeling of ending each day knowing that she lived in servitude of someone else. The exalting joy she had shared with Finn as they’d broken Jakku’s atmosphere, the old but certain feeling of the Falcon’s controls in her hands—that was just a cruel taste.

Been a fighter all her life, but never won in anything that truly mattered.

Rey is sick with it. She hates Kylo Ren for everything he has, for imprisoning her once again, for plundering her mind, for having the privilege of this infuriating, confusing tenderness.

Her eyes narrow.

 _Hide behind the mask and bluster all you want, Sith, but you’ve never_ survived _._

There’s a dark-haired boy standing alone in a starport.

He’s crying a little bit, but muffles his nose in the sleeve of his tunic; he’s trying hard to hide it. His eyes track the path of some unknown craft that Rey can’t see as it screams across the sky.

 

The boy’s a little older now, curled up in the sleeping quarters of a sparse bunker. There are a few bright spots around the room, stuffed toys and holovids strewn across the floor, but they’re untouched. A man and a woman scream at each other in the other room. They sound familiar, but Rey can’t bring herself to discern their voices. The boy stares at the ceiling, looking nearly as tired as she feels.

 

A rough hand lands on his shoulder, belonging to a man that hums with an aura that Rey can’t place, but makes her hair stand on end. It’s the boy who’s on a ship, now, watching a blue-green planet shrink in the viewport. More water than Rey has ever seen.

 _Ben_. The man’s voice is weathered by trials untold, deep, but not unkind. Ben looks away from the window.

 _Yes, uncle_.

 

The boy’s cold and sulking stare, though softer, is unmistakable; she knows without a doubt that, somehow, she’s reading Kylo Ren – Ben? – the way he read her. There are more moments, coursing around Rey and shifting swift as heartbeats, one after the other after the other. She has no idea how she got here but she’s flying with it, digging faster and deeper in a need to understand him, this man that defies explanation.

She’s there, watching him awkwardly struggle through puberty, nose too big for his face, sheets made salty on some nights by shameful tears. She’s there, watching Luke Skywalker train him with first, hopeful wave of the new Jedi. But these knights not like the ones she’d heard about in stories; those sage, compassionate creatures seemed to be devoid of human fault. These ones are just kids, scrapped together in a desperate attempt to revive the order. Homesick, angry—cruel, even. And Ben’s thrown right in there with them.

She skips through landmarks like layover planets on a course through the galaxy, slipping in and out of light speed between each defining moment: The first time he ignites a ‘saber. Smiling shyly at a classmate and getting a wide grin in return. When he reaches out to the Force, and for the first time, it answers; How completely in love with that feeling he is.

 

She sees the deep-darkest ones, too. Rey watches Ben get beat up, called ugly things, and mercilessly scrutinized by Luke as he trains, doggedly, day in and day out. Perhaps the worst of kinds of these memories are the lonely ones, though, the insomniac nights where the only relief is dawn, afternoons spent eating with no one for company but himself. He starts watching history holovids in his spare time and obsessively views the ones about Vader, even hordes them under his bunk.

 _Gross! Are you in love with him? Your own grandpa?_ someone jeers.

 _Solo, Solo, always all alone_. _Daddy’s a war hero but he couldn’t save his little bitch-ass son, huh._

 

Solo – Han Solo? But Rey has no time to process this; despite life’s objective to pummel him down, defying all logical explanation, Ben just keeps growing up. His shoulders broaden and his voice drops. His thick, dark hair gets longer and longer until Master Luke makes him cut it. Curls drop to the ground in a flurry as he shaves, his hair cropped close, and she knows that he hates it.

 

That’s how he looks when he first puts on the helmet, still a crude mask at this point, and breaks his vows. Crew cut, awkwardly grown out.

 

She can’t help but think that it looks wrong to see a blade so blue, so clean-edged and pure, put to work like that. There’s blood on the night-blackened earth and everything echoes with the horrible sound of Vader’s mechanical breath, like a fever-dream that won’t break until Ben is finally as powerful as his grandfather. A waking nightmare, driven by the steady, all-consuming fear that he’ll forever be just his shadow, forever be that boy, alone in his room, without enough gravity to keep his own little galaxy from tearing right up the middle. 

Rey is reeling with the haunting smell of seared flesh, the black taste of a deep, abiding terror, but now things are falling into place. 

 

Then Ren pokes her in the eye and _it really Kriffing hurts._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 100% fictional backstory on this kid. he's just a sad spaceboy man give him a break


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren throws a classic tantrum.

“You’re afraid… that you’ll never be as powerful as Darth Vader.”

 

There are a thousand dialects of emotion in her voice, uncertain notes confusion and malice-- pity, even. Ren hates all of them. She’d just scorched the landscape of him until he was bleak, sterile, almost, yet when she voices his deepest insecurity out loud, he discovers this: there are still parts of him left for her to slash and burn. And oh, it hurts.

 

This little Jakku creature, eye puffy-pink and bloodshot, imprisoned in his own chambers, has broken him to pieces. Give him a mask, give him training, give him objective to single-mindedly follow to the end of the galaxy, and he will _always_ find a way to become that pathetic little boy again.

Kylo Ren has been running from Ben Solo for the past ten years of his life, and now there’s nowhere left to hide.

 

The scream comes from deep in his belly, somewhere primal, a sound that’s clear and unfettered by the mask. His ‘saber’s in his hand, and he’s not sure how it got there, but that’s where it’s always belonged and it the jarring _ksha-ksha_ of the double ignition feels like breathing.

Rey’s skin glows with the red and she doesn’t look away.

 

He shreds everything but not her, never her. He can feel her eyes like a weight across each swoop of his shoulders as he uses the blade like an extension of himself. The torture droid is torn to ribbons with a swift _cho mok_ , but his form soon deteriorates to a nameless, reckless effort that defies any archaic label. He’s just slashing at the wall panels and light fixtures with savage abandon. Right handed jab, left handed slice, a two handed sweep that arcs from floor to ceiling; it doesn’t matter—he knows that he’d tear apart this whole planet without a weapon if he could, just his bare hands alone.

A bead of sweat slips down into the corner of his mouth as he pants with each heavy, surging lunge, and it’s not nearly enough. The molten path of his lightsaber cuts deep, filling the room with the glow of sparks and the tittering fizz of mutilated tech. He doesn’t know if he’s screaming still, doesn’t hardly know what’s in front of him; all there is in this place is the reek of white-hot metal and melted plastic, the delirious need to maim until he has no strength to lift his ‘saber.

It will never be enough. He knows this.

 

“Ben!” Rey cries out, the sound barely threading over the roaring heartbeat in his head.

 

He is so, so very tired, but he turns to her, because—because. She looks for all the world like she’s in hell, everything around her red-raw and pulsating with sparks. A hot world, a wounded world. But there she is, singed, still crying out for him with a name that feels almost like relief; his sole remaining secret, that final thing he’d clutched at with clawed hands, hangs in the air, and now he is utterly spent.

His light saber disengages as he finally grinds to a halt, taking deep, shuddering breaths, while a section of dangling strip lighting finally gives up and crashes to the floor. He feels her fear at what he’s done, the deep wash of her sadness, and something else he can’t quite place, too.

It’s all he can do to stumble to the foot of the interrogation rack and lay against it by her feet like a mutt. Sparks and hot metal prick his legs with pain, but not enough to make him move.

Slowly, slowly, the pounding in his head subsides enough to feel Rey’s heartbeat, which is still entirely too fast and he feels something like guilt. She’s so full of questions, but he’s not ready yet.

He slumps against the rack, her above him, like how he imagines the dark sea would lap around the edges of a golden isle. His eyes close. Outside it’s burning, but in here, with nothing but the rabbit-quick thump of Rey’s beating heart for company, there’s some sort of serenity.

 

Something brushes across the top of his head. He looks up: a pinky finger. Something moves in his heart; with the bindings, it’s all she can manage to reach him with. It’s enough for Ren. He turns, reaches up and delicately grasps the slender, calloused hand in his own gloved one.

 

There’s a pause. He can't decide what to say in this moment. 

 _You’re… not wrong,_ he finally tells her. _About Vader_.

His eyes raise slowly to hers.

 

“Of course I’m not wrong.” She says, and she's smiling.

Just a little.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why can't they just cuddle already smh


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren is conflicted.

Ren can’t bring himself to let go of her hand. He’s not even sure what he’s supposed to do, not anymore. His plans didn’t account for a being made out of things which should be too ugly and too beautiful to reconcile; she’s wrecked him, but he still can’t look at her and think of anything but _right_. She knows what he looks like when he cries and when he kills. He’d damn her, all of this, if he had an ounce of energy to spare.

He’ll spend it further insinuating himself into the soft clutches of pity, instead.

With a flick of his wrist, he disengages her manacles.

He hears her gasp, and waits for her to spring up, run to the door. Commandeer the nearest TIE fighter, just like the traitor, flee. He tells himself he’d welcome it. But he hears nothing, senses nothing but an after note of surprise lingering in her. _He’ll just have to scare her away, then_.

He rises to Rey, who’s innocuously rubbing her redden wrists, and braces one hand on the headrest so that he casts a shadow over every inch of her. The geometry of her body is irritatingly compatible with his own, compact enough to be tucked safely against his chest. His dark hair brushes her forehead, but she still doesn’t run. Stupid.

He collapses onto one elbow to move deeper into her personal space. More scare tactics, and they appear to be working—he thinks. By the way she’s watching him, he guesses that she’s far out of her territory here, their hot breath in each other’s faces. Sith lord and scavenger, close enough to share body heat. It’s not like he’s all that comfortable with being this intimate either, though, so it’s not as effective as he’d planned.

 _But she’s inconsequential_ , he says, closing his eyes again. It’s not impossible to find the map yet, with the BB unit still out there. He’ll find it himself if he has to. This girl, she’s just a slight impediment, a ragpicker from a forgotten planet that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ti--

“I can hear you, you know,” she says, and it’s true. He can't run from her, not any more than he can run from Ben Solo. When he opens her eyes and sees Rey in her entirety, every half-created plan to go on without her somehow being in the picture wicks away to nothing. Even though he’s lost, not even sure where on the spectrum of Dark and Light he lies at this point, neither Ben Solo nor Kylo Ren ever stood a chance against emotional compulsion.

 

He moves impossibly closer. Rey’s heartbeat gets faster, and there’s a little acrid flare of anxiety in her belly. It’s her first kiss, he realizes, and pauses. As much as he hates to admit it, he takes no small pleasure in this; he wants to be her first in everything. He lightly pulls away a strand of her hair with his thumb and watches.

_Yes?_

He notices that she has freckles, faint ones, as she searches his face, puts a hand up on his heart, gauging him in the most instinctive way she knows.

 _Yes,_ she replies, and her voice only quavers a little bit, but he’s already leaning all the way in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> awh sorry guys it got mushy. also shorter chapter cause i had to rewrite parts of the first chapter twice tonight /:


	7. Chapter 7

He’s so soft. Rey is surprised—she’d only seen people kiss before in holovids, a precious few times in real life; Jakku isn’t exactly a romantic getaway. She thinks for a moment of the whores that work Niima outpost, how truly bitter their lives must be. How different this is.

Ren’s just ghosting his mouth everywhere, barely even pressing the cool shadow of his lips onto the corners of hers, but it’s _incredible_. The bond sings with it. Her hand on his chest, his mouth on hers: simple points of contact, but being with Ren like this feels lush in a way that she’d never experienced in a lifetime of sandy wandering.

Kissing… With a Sith, she figured that there’d be a lot of biting involved, somehow?

 _Be patient_. His voice is grit.

Oh. Then she feels warmed everywhere, the type of heat that radiates from the inside, like she’d just run up a dune with a day’s worth of findings on her back.

His skin smells like sweat and his long hair is wild, curling across her cheekbones as he falls onto both forearms, crowding her in between them, and the kiss deepens. She shivers a little— one part pleasure, one part the urge to bolt, the feeling of being trapped like this going against her every scavenger sensibility. She still lets him.

Then he stops, pulls away slightly, and Rey can’t help but feel bereft.

“You—you’re not supposed to do it like that.”

“Like what?”

“With your eyes open.”

She sees echoes of that adolescent uncertainty here, in the crinkle of his brow.

“Why?” He doesn’t understand; this, all of this _kissing_ stuff, is counter to every survival instinct that she knows. Here she is, literally belly up to the enemy with every soft, vulnerable bit exposed; it sounds a little bit too much like surrender to walk into blind. At least she’s fairly confident that she’d be able to do some damage if she had to; in the few second head start that the bond would give her, she’d be able to stun him with a headbutt, or at least rip a chunk out of his lips with her teeth. She’s had to do that before, back home. Some on Jakku didn’t have the courtesy to ask before they took.

But Ren did.

 _I don’t understand_. She wants to watch, to witness how he unravels as they kiss. What tells his body has that his mind isn’t conscious of. She pushes up onto both elbows, one at a time, forcing him to take a full step backwards. A piece of debris skitters across the scorched floor. For all the world, he looks just like that lost little boy again, and she can feel his hurt. Guilt rises, unbidden.

In truth, she never could find satisfaction in deepening wounds, hurting those already damaged. 

They're both looking at each other, sweating in the hot wreckage of Ren’s anger, and then Finn. Finn is here— she has no idea where, or why. Only that the pleasing, gentle insistence of his presence is pushing gently against her mind where there was nothing but Ren a second before. Han’s too, crowding in behind. She senses them. She looks to Ren, and the expression on his face is a fearsome sight to behold.

They both do, then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another short chapter, i'm sorry!! life is getting in the way :( also probs won't be able to update tomorrow, unfortunately.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tender and ruthless.

She must to go to Finn, back to her friends; there’s an overwhelming truth to this. The pull of their collective consciousness against hers is welcome and magnetic, taking her breath away and putting a new resolve in its place. She misses them, doesn’t understand how or why she stormed off into that forest, at a place and time that feels like it’s eons in the past. It’s as if their presence is drawing her out of the glassy-eyed haze she’s in, poison from a wound, sucking out the parasitic spell of raven hair and the creak of leather gloves.

She looks at him, this man before her who might be more storm than human, and knows that she couldn’t survive on this. Attraction—no, not even attraction, just the bastard child of pity and curiosity and fear—that’s not sustenance.

All the same, this is going to hurt.

The sharp metal edges of the cuffs catch on her sleeves as she slips off the rack. Ren looks to her, then back to the chair, as if he’s suddenly realized how awkward it would be to put her back in the manacles when he’s the one who disengaged them. She gets behind it, trying to put something in between them. They might not be on Jakku but this is her element: escape.

There’s white-hot fury in Ren’s eyes. _He can’t have you_ , he says, making his way towards her through the melted ruins of a heating duct, and she doesn’t know if he’s talking about Finn, or Han, or both. Doesn’t matter.

Hair gets in her eyes as she looks around, Ren rapidly closing the distance between them, looking for anything that could be a feasible exit, a weapon, even. Not that a piece of metal would be much more than fodder for his lightsaber. Satisfaction flows through their bond; Ren seems pleased at how her how futile her search is. Something underneath that, too, something that seems eerily like- -- _excitement_?

Then he’s too close and she lunges out at him, teeth gritted in her skull so hard she thinks they’ll shatter. He sidesteps the blow easily, catches her wrist.

 _I can feel it building in you, the anger. Good_.

She kicks her knee up, fueled by nothing but the urge to drive it over and over into his ribs just right, make those black robes impossibly darker with blood. She connects, and his grunt of pain is ridiculously satisfying.

 _Good!_ He cries again, and it’s a strangely exultant thing to come from someone nearly bent in two.

Where the bond was comforting a minute before, now it’s claustrophobic. He’s everywhere, in her head, enveloping her field of vision, traveling down every pathway of her – here come the old fears roaring back again, the trapped animal that claws against her insides with abandon.

She tries to yank her wrist aside, force him to expose his chest, but he redoubles his efforts, pushing back hard. She’s given a split second of warning before his right fist connects with her jaw so hard her ears ring with it; he’s not pulling his punches for her. The same hand that touched her like she’d fall apart loosens her molars, makes her taste blood. Rey stumbles, but it’s good: this is an echo of a thousand fights, grit in her eyes and blood on the sand, scuffling with desperate Jakku scum for years. Muscle memory.

Their boots spit up sparks from the carved-up floor as they scrabble across it, all ugly blows and clawed hands, dirty stuff. With every passing second, Rey pitches further into the frenzy, the bond gone crimson with their tangling adrenaline and bloodlust, too turbulent to read any kind of foreshadowing. That's fine. She’s fought for all her life with nothing more than her bland human senses to guide her, and she’ll do it the same way again.

Something’s curdling in the pit of her stomach, though: it’s too easy. He’s leaving his pale neck vulnerable to her elbows and fists, letting her footwork force his stance into one of defense. He overbalances with a left hook that leaves Rey room to almost bring him to the floor. It’s sickening and utterly satisfying how quickly she can flow from strike to strike; there’s no way he’s not doing this on purpose and that disturbs Rey to her core. But she keeps going, too far gone on the fear and the fury to stop, every ounce of hatred packed in the way her knuckles crack against his cheekbone, jab into his ribs. Then she realizes that he’s actually leaning into her blows.

“Fight!” She demands as she gets him right beneath the chin, making his jaw snap shut. “ _Fight me!”_ Her voice sounds hollow, even to her own ears.

She rolls with his strikes, but they’re clumsily placed and give her an opening to bring his legs out from under him, and he falls. Her anger is fading now, waning into something more akin to desperation.

She watches him struggle to rise, assume a defensive posture. She despises this man, the way he makes her want to tear and destroy and see blood on skin. How he brings out that frothing beast in her and _enjoys_ it.

 _Just use the damn ‘saber and end it all, why don’t you_? She knows that he could, almost wants him to, her hands throbbing with savage punches so badly they feel numb.

 

He does something much crueler, instead.

Rey’s thrown against the nearest wall, head ricocheting off the metal so hard she sees stars. When her vision finally clears, she sees that he’s thrown off the wounded, pathetic stance like a cloak. She almost smiles with it; there he is, Kylo Ren in his entirety.

Every inch of her is pinned and all she can do is watch as he approaches her. One of his eyes is puffy, swollen up, and beginnings of a truly wicked bruise mottle his long jaw. When he speaks, his teeth are bloodied red.

Rey trembles in his hold. She did this.

 

“I know you, Rey.” He says simply, drops of coagulated blood on his lips. He grips her chin with one hand, forcing her to look into his dark eyes. _I know every single part of you. I know how you survived, out there in the wastes, how you killed. That part of you that you try so hard to hide. Do you feel it_?

 

“No!” She cries, trying to wrench free.

 

“You want to kill me,” he says, and the truth of it stings; There’s no doubt that she would’ve gone down that dark path, if he’d let her.

 _Join me_. It’s not a request, and the surprise of it knocks the breath out of her. Join him? Become Sith?

 

 _I know what you dream of, Rey. An island surrounded by endless ocean—so terribly, utterly lonely_.

 

He lays a hand across her cheek where he hit her, watches her flinch. Tender and ruthless.

 

“No, never.” Rey’s panting, sick and exhausted and lost, the notion of going Dark, joining Ren, holding an edge of appeal that it never, ever should, even in her night terrors. “I’d rather die.”

 

He regards her thoughtfully. “Don’t worry, I feel it too,” he says finally, then leans in and presses his mouth to her closed one, a wet, fleeting thing that leaves blood on her lips. She can taste the copper and salt of it.

 

 _We are tied together in the Force. Join me, and we’ll never be lonely again_.

 

He pushes into her mind again, though she fights him with everything she has left: the image of two dark figures, side by side, twin red sabers with blades hissing into the blue night.

 

_NO_

And then everything's white. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fetty wap got me through this chapter ngl
> 
> also like not even sure where this is going at this point haha


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey escapes.
> 
> (reposted due to technical issues)

When Rey comes to, something’s wrong. Something’s happened.

She feels like she’s being crushed against the wall so hard she might never get up. Smashed flat, thin as a sheet of cotton, cheek and chest and thighs pressed to cold, unyielding metal. Ren’s terrible, unmerciful power, finally squeezing the life out of her. _No more kisses, then_.

She opens her eyes: the interrogation rack is canted at a sickly angle, and then she realizes-- floor. She’s on the floor.

She’s nauseous with how disorienting it is, the throbbing that’s pervading every part of her, and before she can clamp down on the feeling she’s dry heaving. Bodily rejection in its purest form.

She’s fallen to the ground, hard, Ren’s power no longer holding her, and the pain is all encompassing; it fills her up and makes it difficult to think of anything else other than its hot pulse. There’s red on the floor beside her hand and she hazily realizes that it’s dripping from her mouth as she gags, salty and warm. Hers or Ren’s or both, she doesn’t know.

The acidic burn in her gorge and sinuses finally subsides enough for her to crawl onto her back, wipe a hand across her blood and bile crusted lips. Then it hits.

Her heart catches in her throat and she can’t stop the adrenaline spike, a sensation that might be the hollow imitation of fear; there’s no Ren. The blood-hot, all-encompassing sensation of him is just gone, like she’d stepping into a shadow after sunning herself for hours. No more of his excitement jangling along her veins, the echo of his pulse to hers gone silent. It’s  _wrong_ , and she hates herself for thinking it, but the sensation just rises out of her, unbidden. He’d settled there, around her mind, and to have him gone is bewildering.

Rey’s on her feet before she can stop herself, and there he is.

He could be dead, strewn out on the floor like that. Ink spot in wrecked metal, just as twisted up and broken looking, like all the bones were drawn out of him so fast that he collapsed right where he stood in a heavy heap.

She’s impressed that she can still feel this way, this scared, after wringing herself so thoroughly dry of her fear. That he can make her heart stop, even though she hates him more than anyone she’s ever known, even more than Plutt. Yet here she is, trembling near his outstretched hand and stooping down to examine him. He could be dead, but here, so close to his body, she knows he’s not; she can still feel the low thrum of his life force in her chest. He’s not asleep, either, just—something. Unconscious, not unlike the force sleep he put her in. Rey doesn’t know if she wants to cry from relief or disappointment. She did this, somehow. She knows it.

_How much you’d have hated yourself if you’d killed him in anger. How much that would’ve destroyed you._

His battered face is lax; it looks so much younger in sleep. None of that heavy angst weighing it down, lips parted in a soft way that Rey knows he’d never let anyone see, not if he could control it. Underneath the fresh purples and pinks lie old scars accrued over years of proving himself over and over, of twisting himself in the darkness. She knows each: her fight-swollen fingers trace over a blaster scar from Utapau, follow the hooked, white curvature left by a Gungan spear.

She’s trembling; the temptation to lay down next to this man and succumb to the guilt of it all, the exhaustion, is so,  _so_ strong, and she feels derelict with it. Her knees are about to buckle under her, but the little flinty core of her, the thing pounded strong by years on boiling, brutal Jakku, says: Go. You must go.

So she does.

 

Whatever happened, whatever freak part of her came out and knocked out Ren, also affected the guard posted outside the chamber. Rey grabs the blaster from the stormtrooper’s unresisting grip on principle, huddles up against the doorframe for cover. She can hear the next patrol tromping down the corridor and prays that she’ll have a little bit of time to sneak away.

After they pass, she cautiously edges her way into the hallway. It’s clear. She picks a direction and pads down it quickly, panic beginning to make breathing a struggle; she has no idea where she is, what direction to go in, nothing other than the vague insistence of Finn and Han that draws her forwards.

She’ll make it work. She has to.

As she advances down the hall, she knows that her already tiny window of opportunity is closing rapidly; there’s got to be another patrol coming soon, and her survival mode supply of adrenaline is waning. Her hands, fat with forming bruises, can barely hold the blaster.

Beads of sweat roll slowly down her back despite how cool it is, the low, soothing hum of the air vents making the floor under her boots vibrate. She wracks her memory for any sort of plan. She knows the body and build of machines, spent years of her life picking apart Empire-designed ships, bit by stolen bit. She’s Rey, the junkyard scum, the scavenger—and there it is.

Rey doubles back in a jog, hoping that Empire ships are as similar as she thinks they are, as she's learned them to be.

She has a plan.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren dreams.

He dreams of a desert.

 

The dunes are shapeless, rippling, and white as silken cloth. The sand and sky betray no kindness, no flicker of humanity, but he knows what path to tread.

His eyes are on the horizon and he’s _freezing_ despite the beating sun. The dry heat makes the air shiver in silver tendrils, but he’s never been so cold in all his life, his body stinging with it even though he's wearing heavy cloaks. The sand could be snow, the way it dips his feet and calves in frigid pins and needles.

He trudges onwards, unconcerned.

Time passes in some vague way, might be minutes or hours or days. Nothing but the cold, the sand. Then he crests one unassuming dune and there it is: the AT-AT. The girl’s little tiny corner of the universe. He half walks, half falls down the dune-face to greet it, all stiff joints and frost.

The helmet comes off first, tossed casually aside to succumb to the desert. It’s instantly lost. He’s glad of it. Then the gloves, though his hands are red and raw, purpling at the fingertips. He sheds his cloak, obi, surcoat, midcoat, tunic, boots. Puddles of black punctuation on a white page, a trail behind him that spells the story of his deconstruction.

By the time he reaches the foot of the metal beast, he’s barefoot and wading through the sand in nothing but his black wool pants and thin undershirt, nipples peaked with the cold in a way that should be embarrassing, but isn’t. He strips himself of the shirt as he walks towards the belly, then stops to unbutton the pants with trembling fingers, pushing them down his thighs and calves. This place, this relic, is holy, and he must enter it wearing nothing but hoarfrost.

Inside, the girl is stirring the little pan of water with her fingertip, waiting for her bread to rise. She seems undisturbed by his nakedness. He’s shivering, but waits patiently for her to finish her evening ritual. Being in her space like this makes the cold just a little more bearable-- the goodness pours out of her like she’s overflowing at the seams.

Perhaps the only truth, or the only one that matters: she’s a Messiah wrapped in salvaged cloth, a little grit-rough around the edges like beings of this sort must be, and he’s been called to the worship. Not an unfamiliar longing, but there’s more power here then he might ever know, in this humble home she’s made. He realizes that every step he’s ever taken in his own frozen landscape, every stride forwards and slide backwards, has been leading him here.

 

When she finishes, the girl comes to him as he knows she will, and he stands before her, completely nameless.

Then she pushes him down against her cot and no—he’s named by nothing but her touch, the heat on his neck left by her breathing, the way she swallows and takes in his own chilly, condensed clouds. Acceptance, complete and total; heat blooms.

She reaches out to him, one of her hands planting on his spread leg. He’s diving deep into a full-body flush from hotness in his core, his groin—he knows this feeling from an old moment worth saving, the sensation of the Force and all it encompasses made tangible for the first time. Incredible. Just the contrast of her bronze hand on his pale thigh is enough to make him whimper. Her grip is unerring and competent and strong, a deliverance of the palpable kind.

He’s nobody and it’s wonderful, every haunting past and looming future feeling lightyears in the distance, gulped into the void of space. Best and most surprising of all, he expects nothing of himself; all he must do is abandon himself to the girl and trust in her deep, abiding power to steer him forwards. He hopes it’s towards salvation, isn’t sure. He’s too far gone on the feeling to care.

The frost of him is melting, turning to sweat. It runs shamelessly down every plane, into every dip of sinew and muscle. They slide and slip against each other and her clothing is deliciously rough on his feverish body.

Being taken in and touched and so thoroughly warmed makes him feel full, and he’s vaguely aware that he’s hard with the pleasure of his completeness, of the way she cradles him in what he truly knows her to be: Light.

He’s overcome with the heat of her as she runs those capable hands across him , helpless to do anything but keen and arch into her touch, hips rolling, bucking and wanton. There’s no need for control in this place. He’s suffused by the presence of the girl, the Force—he’s not sure which, one and the same, but he’s pining for release the way he would pine for air, chest gone pink and splotchy with desire.

He needs her, to be enfolded by her. The girl who holds the balance.

The girl who is Light.

 _Yes_ , she says, and it’s the white-burning bliss of completion.

 

 

Kylo Ren wakes, and there’s wetness cooling on the inside of his thighs.

Rey is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahahaa ah yikes what's happening to this story w o w


	11. Chapter 11

It takes Ren a few bleary seconds to figure out exactly what’s going on. He’s been unceremoniously dumped on the ground, he knows that much; his whole body aches, and he’s got the makings of a terrific migraine forming in the space behind his eye sockets. Despite this, his body is suffused with an odd, sweaty warmth, like he just finished an afternoon of particularly brutal saber training. He starts to sit up, get his bearings, and feels something peculiar. Chafing stickiness, a sensation he knows instantly, remembers guiltily. Shameful nights in the thick darkness. _What--_ !

Rey’s gone too, and for a moment, he can’t breathe. But then he feels the golden pull of her and knows she’s still alive and here on Starkiller, and he’s allowed to exist again. The remnants of her Force signature are pooled in the spot beside him, fading fast, but he has complete confidence in his ability to track her, bring her home.

_She’s a Messiah wrapped in salvaged cloth, a little grit-rough around the edges like beings of this sort must be, and he’s been called to the worship._

 

Ren shakes his head at the little flicker of intuition, a taste of white sand and porridge-colored wool that lingers like a piece of some half-remembered dream. A memory of an event he’s never actually experienced. Interesting. He’s not entirely sure what the vision means, but knows that deciphering it must wait.

 

In fact, everything might need to wait. Just for a minute. He rolls over onto his back with a sigh and assesses the situation, contusions on his face and ribs and forearms pulsing with a dull, persistent ache.

His prisoner’s escaped, he didn’t find the map, he’s spread eagle on the floor, and he just came in his pants like a rangy, overgrown teenager in the throes of their first wet dream. Years of mental training and meditation did not prepare Kylo Ren for this. What he really needs is rest—and not the strange spell of Force induced unconsciousness Rey put him in _, the brat_. Real. peaceful rest in his quarters for multiple hours in conjunction, involving a bed.

He braces a forearm across his eyes and groans. Not one single aspect of today went as planned, and he can practically hear the tones of Hux’s anally precise reprimand once he finds out how far out of alignment things have been skewed. Here’s Ren, laying prone and pathetic in ruins of his own making, mind and heart heavy with the presence of a girl who should, by all intents and purposes, have the end-game influence of a phosflea.  

And yet—and yet. They’re bound, her to him and him to her, in the innermost of ways. She has skill with the Force, too, enough to burn her way into his mind, pry it open, voice his most intimate fears out loud. Enough strength to knock him unconscious long enough for her to escape. He knows that there’s a definite raw quality to her ability; she was only able to access her power once he made the first move, her consciousness rampaging through his own with inexperienced clumsiness.  

Her powers seem to surprise them both. Looking back into the history of her, she was never given any advantage in life other than which she carved out herself, fists and metal and blood. Keen eyes, the ability to dexterously navigate hulking war-corpses. Rey, at her center, has the shrewdness and survival instinct of a scavenger, and he knows this. Took advantage of it.

In some tiny, secret part, admires it.

He feels her now, though he can’t pinpoint her precise location; she probably felt him wake, must be trying in some untrained way to numb his perception of her. He knows she’s near one of the nearby starports, but when he tries to see more closely, his mind slips to this side, like rays off a blast shield. He can read her anxiety, though: she’s high on adrenaline, heartbeat quick, coursing with sour fear and a kind determination that makes his mouth feel full of grit.

Rey. She’s his phantom limb and it’s wrong to be so far apart.

He feels his pulse rise; he needs to order the troops not to harm her if they find her, capture but not destroy. He stands, despite his protesting muscles, and sets a brisk pace away and through the door, leaving the saber scared chamber in a sweep of robes.

The mask is left behind, glinting black and metallic on its pedestal. So are the co-mingled droplets oxidizing on the floor, marking where they fought. Where they became tied. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey shoutout to everyone who's been commenting!! your comments are wonderful and they keep me writing.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey finds Finn and company.

The First Order _desperately_ needs to clean out the air vents on Starkiller Base, Rey decides, stifling yet another cough in the crook of her elbow. She’s crawled her way through star destroyers with three decades worth of desert blown all up inside them, but this—this is ridiculous.

She’s shuffling along at a quick pace on her hands and knees through the clouds of dust, trying to be as quiet as possible. She has some vague understanding of the layout of the system. At least, she might. Auxillery cooling units branching from a main hub, or something like that. She’d used networks like this to navigate some of the larger wrecks she’d found back on Jakku, the little passages running like lymph through all parts of the ship. Wriggling her way into nooks and crannies, she’d been forced to grow out of her claustrophobia young, and she’s never been more thankful; she had to leave the blaster behind after clambering her way into the narrow hatch and making her way into the heating and cooling duct. The space is so slender that it’s barely wide enough to accommodate her form, let alone the bulk of the weapon.

She shivers; this is an echo of her time on the freighter with Finn, huddling under the floor grates and feeling high on just the idea of adventure and Han Solo and _space_. Trying to turn off the right fuse, failing, but being too wrapped up in the chase to care. Her, Rey, in the place that she’d so often imagined, watching those ships ascend gracefully up through the atmosphere day after day, sand in her eyes. Where she once was grounded, flying.

It makes her ache for Finn, his companionship, and she hurries along more quickly even though her joints groan with it. This direction feels right somehow, and she wishes that she was more certain, but her gut is all she has to go on. She’s trusted in less dependable things before.

And then Ren’s back. It’s a feeling like a sunrise, blinding and sudden as he crests over the landscape of her mind, floods her consciousness with strange heat. The molten glow of it flows straight down to the place below her belly and pools there. _Want_. She stops moving with a sharp huff, brushes a hand between her legs on instinct. He wants her.

Then the flushed feeling fades as quickly as it came, turning sallow with shades of confusion and revulsion, and Rey is abandoned back to the chill of the vents. He’s shaking off the unconsciousness and she knows, without a doubt, that he’ll reach out to the bond.

Crouching back on her haunches, Rey feels the air around her, trying in some rudimentary way to stop the inevitable. He’s probing outwards with blind hands that reach dangerously near to her hiding place. Panic mingles with her disgust at the hint of wetness that’s budding between her thighs, knowing that he gave rise to it, but the feeling fortifies her. She feels him stray too close, and she stops him. Simple as that, like seizing a blow with an open hand.

The tingling remnants of his strange lust are still remembered inside her, and she’s trembling with the effort of blocking, but she won’t let him catch her. She’s too afraid of what she’ll do if he does.

 

Making sure to keep her mental shielding steady, she presses on. The presence of her friends is getting stronger now, and she stops every so often to peek out through slats in the vents, trying to catch a glimpse of them. So far there’s nothing but troopers, black-clad personnel. Then she rounds a corner and there, barely audible over the hiss of cooled air, is the sound of Finn’s voice. He’s whispering, though the pace and intensity of the words make it sound like he’d rather be shouting, like he’s lost and desperate and tired.

Rey’s never heard anything so wonderful.

Before she can think she’s hurrying towards the maintenance hatch, lifting the panel and sliding it aside. The rectangle of bright, sterile light from the hallway is stunning, but she jumps down, feet first.

Her landing isn’t particularly graceful. She doesn’t mind, though, because there they are.

Her appearance clearly took them by surprise; between the three of them, there are about four different types of firearm trained on her prone form, blaster muzzles poised to take on whatever First Order monster that’s been stalking them in the vents. Then Finn’s eyes widen.

“Rey!” He cries out. His voice is plaintive with relief. His blaster drops with a _clang_ , and all of a sudden he’s right there on the ground with her, taking her up in his arms. He smells like clean sweat and the leather of Poe’s jacket.

Over Finn’s shoulder, Rey watches Han’s mouth grit into something like a rueful smile as he lowers his gun. _Crazy kid_. Chewbacca lets out a joyful yodel.

 

Hugging him feels like coming home. They hold each other without words, Finn cupping the back of her head and gently pressing her chin into his shoulder. He’s the gunner to her pilot, one half of their crew of two, and for just the barest of seconds, Rey can’t help but let go, her spent body sagging inside the warmth of his embrace.

This is a mistake.

Ren’s presence feels like a slap, rushing in where it once was absent. She flinches hard into Finn’s chest. Ren’s mind is unerringly clear now that the bond is free of obstruction, but even if it were dulled, she doubts it would make a difference; Ren is _livid_.

Her pulse pounds with a litany of curses that screech from Huttese to Lassat to dialects that Rey can’t interpret nor identify, but growls down to a notion that defies language.

_TRAITOR._

The overfamiliar red hum of the saber. Black blood on ebony skin.

 

Her eyes water with the need to block it out, tamp it down. Fury, fear, jealousy, hijacking her mind and making her sick. Ren at his ugliest, everywhere.

 

Then Finn’s rough palms are cupping either side of her face, and she registers that he’s shaking her gently.

“Rey,” He’s saying. “Rey. Talk to me.”

There’s an edge in his voice, like he’s terrified and failing miserably to hide it, and his face is painfully open. Living in a mask does that to you, thinks the scavanger parts of her. Makes you easy to read.

“We need to run.” Her jaw is swollen stiff, but the words come with surprising conviction. “ _Now_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhh sorry for updating a day late :(( thanks to everyone for being patient/all the comments !!
> 
> Yay Finn is fun to write


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her body might be as heavy as planet-bones, older than the red giants, fit for supernova.

“You dropped out of hyperspace and did _what_?” Rey says, bruised ribs complaining with the effort of keeping up with Finn. They’re jogging down the hallway soundlessly, or as quietly as three grown humans and a Wookie can possibly manage, at least. They slow to a stop as they reach the corner, Han signaling with his hand to wait as he looks around, blaster raised.

 

“Crash landed in a forest,” Finn whispers. He shrugs. “It was pretty cool.”

 

“-- And incredibly stupid.” Rey finishes, glancing over her shoulder to check for the next patrol. Nothing but a long, sterile stretch of hallway, dark and empty as a tomb. Not for long, not with a ridiculously jealous and highly embarrassed Sith lord hot on their heels.

The lid she’s tenuously put on the bond trembles, but holds steady.

 

 

“The base shields have a fractional refresh rate. Being incredibly stupid is how we’re saving your sorry Jakku ass.”

 

Rey elbows him, and he yelps, but he’s smiling. It’s a relief to see him relax a little bit, hum with the energy of this twisted heist. But nothing could overshadow the guilt that clings deep in her belly at the sight of him, how visibly uncomfortable he is just to be in this place. His memory is betraying him, layout of the facilities worked into his unconsciousness over a lifetime raised in First Order space. _Go right down this corridor. Take this lift_. She knows that he’d rather be anywhere else in the galaxy than here, in this weapon. She’s grateful for the sacrifice; when she’d woken up in those cold, chrome manacles, some small part of her thought that that she’d flung away the only parts of her life that truly mattered back on Takodana. Abandoned in the desert once again, but this time, by her own doing.

And yet, here he is. Here they all are, just for her. She’s uncomfortable with the idea of debt on principle, but she’s just too tired to care, and something about the gentleness in Finn’s eyes makes her settle back. She’ll find a way to repay them.

 

“You two wanna keep flirting, or get off this metal fucking snowball?” Han’s voice is sharp, but he doesn’t look back at them. “Chewie ‘n me, we’re leaving. With or without ya. “

He hustles them ahead with a quick gesture, then takes up a position at the rear. She catches a glimpse of him as he passes, all leathery skin and righteous exasperation.

As much as it stings, Rey sees it. There’s Ren, in Han’s long face, the set of his shoulders. They both have an antsy energy about them that works its way out in the franticness of their hands, their tendency to pace. Though Rey wouldn’t have thought to look for it without the inkling provided by Ren’s memories, there it is, undeniably: familial resemblance.

It’s bewildering how something so staunchly _good_ as the spirit of Han Solo could’ve begat such a dark one as Ren, given life to something so turbulent and discontent. But, of course, this question isn’t real-- she knows the methodology of it, had watched patiently as Ren was ground down to the base of him, then formed into something else entirely. Han’s anger, his absence. The person that was built up into a towering legend of bravery and glory and guts, but was never anything more than a man.

She hurts for the father.

And for the son, beats her traitorous heart. And for the son.

 

They make their way out of the complex quickly, only a handful of troopers shot, control panels reduced to smoking embers. Riding on the seat of their pants like the hotshot Resistance heroes they are, or at least, are pretending to be. A washed-up myth, a soldier turned traitor, a Wookie, and a piece of Jakku trash, blasting their way through durasteel and plastic. All in all, a successful escape, Rey thinks dryly, dragging her exhausted body up, away from the jamb of the maintenance exit they’ve found. The chemical smell of the complex’s air gives way to chill that tastes of pine, syrupy and cold, and she shiver’s in Finn’s (Poe’s) jacket, which she’s made pale with dust. She’d resisted at first when he’d shucked it off and thrust it her way, but now she’s intensely grateful for it, shivering as she looks towards the bowed horizon; it’s warm down in the catacombs, but the surface of Starkiller is _freezing_.

 _A fitting home for him_ , she thinks on instinct, and. And.

Her body might be as heavy as planet-bones, older than the red giants, fit for supernova. She’s come down from her adrenaline high so fast that it’s deposited her at the feet of old age, and she staggers in the snow, slowing behind her friends. That’s right, there’s a hard truth in escape that she’s yet to face, doesn’t want to. Here’s where he belongs, will stay.

She comes down to her knees in the drift, pants darkening with melting frost, the sting of aborted tears souring her mouth. It tastes like mutiny.

 

_Helmet, black, insect-shiny, lowered over a shitty haircut and flushed ears._

She hates him, oh, she hates him.

Her friends are running back to her now, all concern and puffs of frozen breath. She watches their boots in the snow, cresting towards her in the powder, until there’s only a few bitterly-cold feet between them—and they stop. She looks up. There’s something behind her, and they’re tracking it with the kind of blankness that only comes with deep, disturbing shock.

 

_Alone in a starport, wiping his face, eyes climbing in the sky to somewhere she can’t see._

 

Then she’s not really sure what’s happening, a sound like the planet is being rented up the middle, and Finn’s heavy warmth is on top of her, pressing her cheek and nose and ear into the frost, blanketing her body with his own.

But Rey’s smart enough to know a ship’s engine explosion when she hears one.

She wriggles under Finn enough to turn her eyes skyward, hot pieces of shrapnel sinking into the snow around their bodies with keening hisses. There’s a gorgeous drama going on up there, against the backdrop of the frigid twilight: Streaks of green and red cannon fire, ribbons of smoke in the atmosphere. The Resistance has come to Starkiller.

She watches the slim, white fighters plummet to the snow, and she knows. They’re losing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol shitty late night chapter. school is rlly hard man 
> 
> also been listening to figure 8 by FKA twigs on repeat cause it kinda makes me think of ren n rey ?? idk


	14. Chapter 14

The Force around Ren is roiling so violently that his lieutenant’s chin quivers as he receives his new orders. He can actually track a bead of sweat as it slides down the man’s temple, a trembling droplet on the shadow of his stubble. Ren’s words are calm, nonthreatening, phrases lilting down in the end with sense of finality. It’s simply this: he will find her.   

“You will find the girl—“

“Yes, my lord.”

“—And bring her to me.”

 “O-of course, my lord.”

 “If she has been hurt, or if she has been injured in any capacity—“

“ _Never_ , my lord. The very idea is. ” The man’s adam’s apple bobs as his words are sucked down in a guttural swallow. “L-ludicrous.”

The lieutenant’s knees look like they’re one more threat away from giving out, and Ren signals his dismissal with the casual wave of a hand. The man bows his head, then swiftly removes himself from the bridge, gloved fists clenched at his sides. Hux would be unhappy, Ren thinks, to know that he any kind of emotional sway over his lovingly bred, perfectly stoic Imperial cadets. Even if it was just the ability to make them piss themselves.

He heads back towards the central mezzanine. He’s careful to comport himself with his usual _don’t fuck with me_ stride, and the troopers part like the sea around a rock; might be the writhing of his aura, might be the plum-blue bruises darkening on his jaw and throat. Could even just be surprise—he can’t remember the last time he showed a square inch of warm flesh to anything but the slate-grey walls of his chambers, Snoke’s towering presence on the dais.

How’d the girl make him take his helmet off when he’d kept the human parts of himself so private for so long that it felt like the natural order of things? Make him cast the first stone? He’s not sure.

He structures his expression more tightly. Under his robes, the uncomfortable itchiness between his legs tints everything with a humiliation that rests acidic in his gut. In his temples, Rey’s absence pinches like a headache. He wishes that he had his mask very, very much.

He comes across a peripheral maintenance corridor that’s blessedly free of personnel and his feet lead him inside, as if on a whim. A murk of pain, _wrongness_ , clouds everything, and he doesn’t know that he’s resting on the wall until he feels the duracrete scraping the cotton of his tunic, rough against his skull. He realizes, vaguely, that he’s trembling.

 

By the s _tars_ , what has happened to him?

 

Then the levy breaks.

Rey is being held, safe and happy and something that’s almost whole. Golden bubbles pop gently against his consciousness, and the feeling of her happiness is so pleasing that he wants to sun himself in it on instinct.

The heft and warmth of the embrace of a man, crackling of leather and the slightly singed ozone smell that comes from traveling in hyperspace. Sweat-scent, unabashed. Ren stiffens, recoils.

 

FN-2187— _no, Finn, she calls him_ Finn.

 

Kylo Ren has hated a great many people in his life, and his ability to loathe is, as Phasma says, _Impressive_. The hardy kernel of wrath has always been there, buried inside him; the Dark simply toned and strengthened the force of it like some bloody, pulsating muscle, nurtured over many careful years. Luke had been so foolish and blind to the raw, red pump of his anger; Snoke had feasted on it, deepened it until it became the cold, abiding burn of stars.

Ren has despised so much, including himself, but he doesn’t think that he’s ever hated someone so much in his life as he does at this moment.

 

He can’t think, he can’t feel, and he can’t even scream.

 

Something about that old, animal need to destroy, metal or marrow, all the same under clawed hands. Something about a loneliness so deep that he’ll never crawl out of it alive.

In the end, there is this: nothing in this universe could ever stay his.

 

His hand aches with a sharp freshness, and slowly, surely, he surfaces. He looks down through the haze of his pounding head: dark blood, split knuckles. There’s a dent the metal of the wall and it’s satisfyingly large. His teeth are chattering.

He gingerly brushes the back of his hand across his mouth, something poetic about the taste of metal and the taste of angry blood, men and machines and the universe. A combination of all three, great leader of the Knights of Ren licks his wounds in a darkened corner, hunched like a great, frothing beast.

 

His mind is shuddering with aftershock and then-- silence, numbness. The change is so arresting that he loses himself for a second, can’t self-identify. This man who is no longer vibrating with pain, who is he? But he most brittle parts of Ren’s heart, straining under the weight of helplessness and fruitless anger, crack like frost; he knows what this is.

He’s so cold, and there, in this vacuum of space:

Snoke.

 

 _Kylo Ren,_ _to me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahh jealous kylo is dramatic kylo i guess 
> 
> also, to everyone who commented on the last chapter: thank you so much for your kind words. i've been really busy with school but i make time to read them and they keep me writing <3


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snoke and Ren discuss what has happened.

Ren comes when he’s summoned. Of course he does, even though every step he takes towards the holoprojection chamber is a step further away from Rey, and therefore a step in the wrong direction. He feels her, pulsating there at the nape of his neck, the sweetest sting. The bond aches as it stretches, and the sensation of her is dimming with distance, darkening his pace.

He is obedient and he is _mortified_ ; going before the Supreme Leader after being brought to orgasm by the very prisoner he was supposed to interrogate, the incriminating evidence of it stiffening against his crotch—it isn’t terribly dignified, to put it gently. Neither is the way he feels, needs, for Rey, but he thinks that the former takes premium.

Clammy beads of sweat work their way into his cowl as he walks. Ren’s been thoroughly rearranged, his slippery, pale innards all sliced up and mixed around by sand-calloused hands, and if Snoke doesn’t already know this, he’s about to find out.

 

“The girl escaped?”

Snoke’s voice is raspy, blinking slow. The dark slate of the stately chamber is hard on Ren’s knees, and his neck hurts with the strain of looking up at his lord, of taking in his enormity. He’s at the mercy of this strange god and his omniscient clutch. The Supreme Leader of the First Order kneads his apprentice’s mind, just as he has for the past decade and a half, squeezing out bright bits of memory and shards of emotion so that he might read them where they pool on the stone.

“No,” one gnarled hand curls, uncurls. “You _let her free_.”

Ren fights it, but he can’t help the reflexive guilt at the disappointment in his words.

“I—She—“ Ren’s throat is dry with terror. But then again, there’s a sickly type of hope sprouting in him whose growth he can’t quite quench; Snoke, his master, is knowledgeable and wise, has proved this time and again over years of tutelage. He is sage in the ways of both the Dark and the Light, and it’s a sort of balance the likes of which Luke could never hope to achieve. Perhaps Snoke would look with mercy upon Ren, now that this girl has made him to so thoroughly inhabit that gray space between the two?

 

“Rey.”

Her name rings in his ancient throat as he plucks it from Ren’s mind, silencing him.

“This girl… She has changed you, my apprentice. Has she not?”

He swallows. “My Lord, I—“

“You have formed something of a connection with her.”

There’s no point in denying this. “Yes.”

He searches more, bathing Ren in icewater, and then emits a curious hum. “And you can sense her, you say?”

“Yes, Lord.” He shudders, lets his eyes close. “Every minute of every hour.” _It’s maddening_.

Snoke prods his mind further, reaches in more deeply. All at once he finds it, the cord of gossamer, delicate filaments that ties Ren and Rey together, the most intimate part of Ren that he himself could possibly imagine. It is a tender thing, a new one, and though it has been made ragged at the edges by the stresses of its turbulent creation, it is undeniably whole. Snoke runs his cold hands through the silky, newborn fineness of it, and Ren’s gorge rises out of reflex. Having his mind explored by Rey was violating, but this—this is one thousand times worse. After what feels like eternity, the terrible sensation ceases. Snoke reclines in his throne with a satisfied wheeze, leaving Ren to halting swallow his bile, rub away the sweat on his clenched brow with trembling hands.

“Bound by the Force.” Snoke ponders. “How very curious.”

Ren’s eyes flash open; he is desperate for information, for guidance of any kind.

“What does that mean?” The question spills out before he can stop it.

Snoke seems to pause for a second, as if debating his answer, poring over a great catalogue of ancient knowledge. Finally, he settles:

“It means, young one, that you have been made _vulnerable_.” Snoke’s tone is sharp, and Ren bows his head in penance. “A bond of this type is highly unusual in the realm of both the Sith and the Jedi. The tie of this sort between you and the girl means destruction for the both of you.”

Ren breath huffs hot and wet against his chest, not daring to look up at Snoke, acknowledge the truth of it.

“This union—it’s a monstrosity. I can’t allow it. Do what is necessary, Ren, to return things to their natural order.” Snoke’s voice is more of a feeling than a sound, vibrating in every molecule of his being. “Remove this obstacle. Fulfill your fated path.”

Ren’s stomach slides. He cannot speak, for fear of sobbing openly.

“ _Answer me, Kylo Ren_!”

Ren raises his eyes and _fuck_. Every calculated move, every cloaked intention and delicately orchestrated plan to topple Snoke over years of diligent obedience—it’s all rubble. He’s laid utterly bare before his Lord, prone in a way he hasn’t been since the very first time Snoke entered his mind, guided his thoughts into the Darkness. Fifteen and oh, so soft.

It’s that base helplessness all over again; the idea of Rey dying, or even the thought of Snoke tearing the bond to shreds, is unacceptable. Purely _wrong_. Ren sees it now, in sickening clarity: a sickening future. Floating, untethered, amongst the stars, gasping and gasping for breath that the horrible slurry of ionic dust and emptiness can’t give him.

His pride is weeping, but, in truth, it hasn’t really stopped, not since that very first blind fall into her consciousness. It’s grim, but undeniable; his only choice is to throw himself upon the mercy of this all-knowing, terrible being, his almost-father, and pray that gravity will right itself so that the girl might live. That they might be reunited.

“My lord, I—I—“ Words fail him again, even as tears begin to roll down his cheeks. The desperate urgency is ceaseless.

Snoke Sneers.

“Look at how pitiful she’s made you. You’re just a _pup_ , needy for what’s soft and warm.”

Ren can’t exactly deny the jab, but he’s grappling with the seedings of an idea, now.

“Supreme Leader—y-your foresight, surely it must have shown you how skilled Rey is in the Force?” He clears his phlegmy throat. “There is use for her. I know it.”

“But what use is there for _you_ , dark one? Answer me that. How am I to maintain confidence in a man so undone so quickly, from such a simple touch.”

“Yet you know that this, this, _thing--,_ ” Ren gesticulates jerkily, frustration frothing out alongside desperation. “--It’s the furthest thing from simple. It defies explanation. Precedent, maybe. Even you, my master, as totally knowledgeable as you are in the ways of the Force, are uncertain. Who’s to say that this bond, or tying, or whatever it might be called, is not of use to the Order? There’s much about our connection that is still…shrouded to me, but I know this: I am

stronger and more powerful than I have ever been when I am with her.”

The words ring true as he says them, through the veil of wounds and stormy bruises.

 

_He needs her, to be enfolded by her. The girl who holds the balance._

Yes. Though only in tastes, he has surely felt it. The power of the two of them.

 

Snoke’s laugh is a brittle thing, halting and wheezing in a way that sounds as if it’s been drawn from deep inside his chalky lungs.

“Oh,” Snoke nearly coughs, “My young, guileless, apprentice.”

Fear licks an icy tongue up Ren’s spine.

“I had nearly thought you’d grown out of this—sentimentality, years ago. A stirring speech, I’m sure, but you forget. You always forget. Even the smallest eddy in the Force works in much larger ways than lovesick, mewling men. Than you, Ren, now or ever.”

Ren’s breathing is coming in quick, shallow pants, and he feels a little delirious, like he’s trying to pilot a craft that’s tumbling helplessly out of his control. Oh, stars.

 

“Please. _Please_.” He has no words, nothing in language meaningful enough to encompass his need. “I. I can’t live without her.”

And there went the last little broken, pathetic bit of it, hanging off his lips in a brine of salty tears and blood.

 

Kylo Ren doesn’t know it, but it’s now, in this precise moment, that he looks more like his grandfather than he ever will, even in his dreams: On his knees, eyes wet, groveling to a dark figure to save the center of his universe.

But in this haunting reincarnation, Ren does something slightly different. He does something that he’s never done before: against the unmitigated vastness of Snoke’s mind, he pushes _back_.

 

It’s a twisted, desperate attempt to _show_ Snoke Rey’s power, her meaningfulness, and he slips into Snoke’s consciousness like it’s a pool of inky water. In a heartbeat, he shows his Lord everything, images flashing so fast that Ren can only name it in mechanical terms. A data-dump of purely Rey.

It all flies by, sandy and swift. Snoke is apparently too stunned to neither embrace nor reject any of it, until all at once Ren and Rey are fighting.

Ren and Snoke languor in how much brutal force was behind her fists, the twist of her mouth, how she beat him and beat him until she could barely move. Teeth-biter, eye gouger.

Survivor.

_I feel it in you, the anger. Good._

 

Ren’s in the cavernous chamber again, dazed, but whole. He’s surprised; he didn’t expect to make it out of Snoke’s mind alive, honestly. Snoke says something but he doesn’t quite catch it through his ringing ears.

He realizes that Snoke is looking at him with expectation. “My Lord?” he asks, shaking his head, trying to clear it.

 

“ _Bring her to me_.”

 

Snoke’s towering figure flickers, then dissolves completely, leaving Ren in solitude. He feels the pins and needles of his folded legs beneath him, watches dust motes billow to the whim of his breath.

He’s alone, and for once, it’s almost blissful.

 

Slowly. Quietly. He lies down, pressing his ear against the cool stone, and, for just a moment, Kylo Ren listens to the circadian rhythm of the planet’s slow movement beneath him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what's frustrating? I think I would've written the earlier chapters of this thing very differently if I had written them now. The story back then was in a much different place... I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with the idea of things evolving as they go. Thanks for sticking with me, y'all.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey is exhausted.

Finn is holding her hand. It’s the third time he’s done it, but the first time she hasn’t told him to stop.

“We gotta go back,” he says. Rey looks over the broad eve of his shoulder, up and away to the carnage in that sodalite-blue sky, and stands transfixed.

Peripherally, she can tell that Han is watching her, arms crossed over his chest, looking every part the crotchety old man. He’d told her what had happened; Something about a world-destroying weapon being recharged, something about the fate of Starkiller coming up in their faces hard and fast and _now_. They need to destroy a thermal oscillator. _Yes, finally:_ language that she understands.

But.

Rey can’t go back. It’s as uncomplicated as the kinetics that dictate the orbit of galaxies, as reflexively easy as her fogging breath: turning back the way they came, to Ren, would be a terrible idea. A _horrible_ idea, in fact. It had taken an excruciating amount of effort to simply get up off the snow and _move_ ; every inch of frozen ground she covers is earned blood and sweat, her own hard-hewn memories. Her sanity. She’d used the last of what luck the universe has given her to be free of Kylo Ren, and she doubts that her stars were made to align in such fortunate constellations more than once.

 

She turns, Finn’s eyes meeting hers. His brow is drawn; he’s waiting for her to say something, anything. Rey shivers. She hasn’t told him, any of them, the exact nature of what happened, but they’re smart enough to know that something big had gone down while she was in Ren’s custody. So Finn’s waiting patiently for her to claim her dissent, or her willingness, her urge to charge ahead into the fire and the fury, Ren and the bond be damned.

Either way, it’s entirely her choice. _I lost you once on Takodana_ , says his the firmness of his grip, the focus in his dark eyes. _I will not lose you again_.

It’s intense, and Rey finds her gaze once again slipping away to the dogfight above.

And then, she just—breathes.

She never thought that she’d come to it, but in this moment, she’s homesick. Acutely so. Not for that dream-shimmering garden that she had declared “home” at an age too early to remember, a place made up entirely of warm, loving arms and forehead kisses and tender, secret longings too private for the glaring sun.

Her numb toes flex, curl, in their soggy boots, and for the first time in her whole life she _misses_ sand, misses Jakku, with a bitterness that cinches her throat tight.

Where is that simplicity of space and time that she had grown to so thoroughly despise? She wants it back, she _wants it back_ , somewhere that’s a little less complex than this, a little more built from the tangible. A place where what you are and show yourself to be—they’re simple; the body language of survival is easy to read, even if you have four arms or two heads. None of these strange, tacit loves, no calculated maneuvers spun flimsily from people’s minds, executed through cloaking veils of politics and treachery.

Home, where emotions and actions were carried out with pragmatism, and there are rules: If you’re angry, you fight, but only if you can win. If you love, it’s with the clear, clean intensity of danger. If you’re sad, conserve your tears.

Wake. Burn. Sleep. Fight, fuck, despair. Rey has become learned in much over the years, but those delineations? She knows them, better than the lines in her hands.

Rey looks down, to where their cold-pinkened paws are intertwined. She wants, desperately, to understand this Finn.

And then the other, too: No more of this man _in her veins_. There’s still grime encrusted on the corner of her lips where he kissed her, wet with his own blood. It’s parasitic, and she despises the animal that he’s formed her to be.

In the end, everything is a sensory overload, a feast of the heart and the eyes, ears and tongue; _This is too much._

 

Rey is very cold, and she wants, more than anything, to go home.

 

Finn is waiting with visible anxiety when she finally meets his eyes. She squeezes his hand, gently.

 

“Let’s do it.”

 

 

 

The very nature of their plan pulls against the taught, sinewy cords of her sense of self-perseveration, but that’s just it; this is far more than her. Always was, since the first moment she met BB-8. So when she feels something brush against the deepest parts of her as they make their way their way across the tundra, something absolute-zero cold and entirely not Ren, she doesn’t stop. She keeps running; a billion lives are waiting with baited breath for her to succeed, and she has no choice but to rise up and meet them.

 

They make it inside the oscillator housing facility, thanks to Finn. “I used to work in sanitation down here,” he explains to Rey as she shrugs the light dusting of frost from shoulders of the leather jacket. Han rolls his eyes. Her wry smile feels tender, a little bruised around the edges, but it's real.

They convene in an alcove above the howling maw of the machine, the diameter of it wide enough to pilot two Falcons through with room to spare. A plummet straight down to the planet’s core, the blue-glow of fission underlighting everyone’s faces.

“We should split up. Chewie and I’ll take care of the exterior struts, you two put charges on the generator,” Han says, handing her and Finn twin sets of bulbous, black explosives. Rey palms hers, cradling it in swollen fingers.

“Magnetic,” Han explains. “Stick it on something metal, it’s good to go. Shouldn’t be too difficult.” He points a blocky finger at Rey, eyebrows raised. He looks a little deranged. “Make sure Mr. Rebel Hotshot doesn’t fuck it up, alright?” Before she can reply, he turns, hoisting the canvas bag of explosives over one shoulder, muttering something that sounds suspiciously like _laserbrain_ and _already had to save the galaxy once_. Chewie nods at them, gesturing to the nearby hallways with his bowcaster, then falls into line behind Han.

 

She looks to Finn, who’s hefting the bomb in his hand with a cross between curiosity and revulsion. “Ready?”

He looks up, grinning. “ _Hell_ yes.”

 

The make a good team, though that’s hardly a surprise. Finn keys in the generator chamber passcode while Rey covers him, back to heaving back. She can feel the heat of his bulk bleeding over her, even with an inch of space and leather between them. It feels like reassurance.

The door finally slides aside with a soft shush and a quietly exclaimed _Yes!_ From Finn, and they slip in.

The generator is a towering, durasteel beast, all hoses and glowing readouts and the _thrummm_ of thermal energy conversion. Rey instantly wants to dissect it, to know how it works.

“Hey!” The officer at the console shouts, before she clips him with a round. He goes down with a thud. Rey tosses Finn his handgun, which he catches deftly, before using it to poke around the corners of the room, checking for anyone else. It’s empty, thank gods; Rey knows her body well enough to tell that she’s simmering on the dwindling reserves of her second wind, almost completely played out on adrenaline and exhaustion. If she lives to see tomorrow, her muscles are going to be _exquisitely_ sore—not to mention all the bruises she’s acquired.

Han was right; the setup of the explosives is ridiculously easy to prepare, no supervision by Rey required. She looks around one last time before quietly padding back into the railing-enclosed walk that fronts into the gargantuan, open column of the oscillator. She keeps tight to the wall, wishing that they had at least some skimpy sort of camouflage; her desert wrappings don’t exactly blend with onyx black.

“Next left. First door,” He whispers behind her, the gunner guiding his pilot to her next target. It’s an intriguing reversal.

She glances back over her shoulder, pretending to scan the hanger area behind them, but really just wanting to look at the easy strength of him, the reassurance that’s inexplicably ingrained into the way he carries himself. He’s scanning the opposite wall for the enemy, steel-eyed, salty-soaked, chest and shoulders heaving with deep breaths. She watches him hunch, casually wiping the sweat from his temple with a shoulder, and then it’s too late to look away—he’s caught her.

He’s surprised, and then a whole other range of emotions that Rey’s not too adept at reading, as nonfluent in the languages of _whatever this is_ as she is. He seems to look through her, _into_ her, and his eyes narrow just the tiniest bit, while the muscles in his face and jaw relax so quickly that she doesn’t think he’s aware of it.

He doesn’t look away, and Rey discovers something: she might not want him to.

 

Then, because this is the way her universe works, Kylo Ren’s existence chooses this opportune moment to burst into her consciousness with a triumphant shout of _herehereherehere_ , screaming at her through three floors worth of metal.

“Rey?” Finn asks. Rey finds that she can’t answer, because her mouth has suddenly gone totally dry:

 _Han_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woahh this got wayy more Finn/Rey heavy than I anticipated... not to worry, though, folks.  
> Also, Rey is so much more difficult to write than Ren for some reason? I think once you make her a little more ambiguous than just a beacon of the Light, she starts to get really complex, if that makes sense? idk idk  
> As always, thanks for the lovely comments!


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up. Drama ahead.

Rey lands with a breathless _ungh_ against the guardrail of the observation deck, air punched right out of her diaphragm, feverish eyes alighting on the two tiny figures on the catwalk far, far below. It’s the scene that she’s already watched play out behind her eyelids, hoped desperately to be untrue: Ren has found Han. Or, rather, it’s the other way around; the sound of Ren’s most sacred secret is still ringing against the dark walls, rough with deep baritone of Han’s voice.

_Ben!_

It’s nightmarish, watching Ren’s silence as Han approaches him, trying desperately to breathe again. She hates, _hates_ , this old, familiar feeling of helplessness, trapped up here as the only man who’s ever felt like family draws even closer to the most destructive force she’s ever known. A force who’s so tightly bound to her that he can sense her presence here, knows that she’s watching this.

She knows how this ends.

The sound of clomping boots on tile, curses, panting breath; suddenly, Finn’s giant hand is wrapped around the railing at Rey’s elbow as he braces himself against it, having finally caught up with her.

“Rey, what the fu—oh _shit_.”

She can’t answer Finn, can’t even glance at him out of the corner of her eye; Han is speaking to Ren and she strains to catch the sound of it, though it’s too muted and far away to really understand. Too intimate. They’re edging up to each other with such delicacy, rawness worked into how gently Han spreads his empty hands towards his son, the man that Rey knows he hasn’t seen in over ten years.

The last memory Ren has of his father skitters across her mind like a dying spark: A younger Han, but a haunted one, one hand resting on the flank of the Falcon, somehow more ancient, folded up and tired, than she has ever seen him. The echo is torn around the edges by strife, years worth of Ren’s attempts to smother it, but there it burns in his mind, as unwavering and painful and bright as a star’s carbon core.

Han Solo’s disappointment, a brand stamped right in the center of his chest.

 

They keep getting closer and closer, like two suns locked in the inevitable gravitational pull of a binary star system, unable to wrench free for fear of becoming unspooled into the blackness of space. Far above, Rey feels like she’s watching a speeder crash in slow motion; it’s a terrible sight, and she couldn’t look away even if she wanted to.

 _No. No!_ Rey trembles against the railing with the desire to somehow, impossibly, fling herself over the edge and put herself between the two of them. To do something, no matter how impossibly slight, to hinder this, to save Han’s life—

 

The pleasure of reopening the bond nearly blinds her, so sweet it’s almost cloying, clean and golden on her tongue, leaping through her synapses and veins. _Yes. This is how things are meant to be._ The humming satisfaction of returning to her base state, her right state: inside Ren’s very cells. She lunges through the gratification, though she’s slowed by the syrupiness of it, and out the other side, into Ren’s headspace.

 

It’s said that the reek of burning human flesh smells like nothing else. This is true, and Rey identifies it immediately: something inside Ren has been slaughtered. Low, warbling moans like wet-mawed animals, ash, everything trembling and open and fresh.

Someone has hurt him, terribly so.

He’s blindsided by her—he wasn’t expecting her to do this, not at all, and the wounded remnants of him instantly start rubbing up against her with abandon, like she’s a creamy balm on all of his festering psyche. Where there once was that little dark-haired boy, now there’s nothing but howling, ravenous sense of isolation, the loneliness no longer articulated by some semblance of imagery, unformed into anything that makes rational sense.

Rey staggers; how much strength it must have taken for him to walk around like this, so pillaged.

_Make it stop Make it stop Make it stop_

His abject misery pulls at Rey, as hard as she fights it. This is a lightless space, a hungry space, and it hungers for _her_. He’s pulling her under with him, like they’re both bodily entangled in one of the sinking sandpits outside the outpost, him pushing her down while he tries, desperately, to stay afloat in his suffering. She’s going under and she can’t breathe, _she can’t breathe_ —

Against all logic, she gasps when she recognizes it. There it is, deep down in the burnt-black pit at the bottom of his stomach, underneath his private circles of Hell: Ren’s horrible intent.

He’s going to kill Han. This is how he’ll find his way out, he’s thinking, half-crazed with pain. Power is the goal and Han is the obstacle, the need to strip all of the pink, soft remainders of his childhood from the meat of him, winnow himself down to the craggy pith of control. Simple, direct path to the cessation of suffering. She digs deeper, is shocked to find more: she is the goal and Han, again, is the obstacle, a thousand little seconds of their burgeoning friendship like glass in Ren’s lungs. He’s scrapping up all of her other new and fragile connections one step at a time, leaving no room in Rey’s heart but for him. It’s only a glimpse of his feelings for her, that roiling sea, but that glimpse is all she can possibly stand.

Rey’s ears can’t hear his voice, but her mind echoes with the rumble of it in his throat, in his jaw, like it’s her who’s speaking.

“I’m being torn apart.” His voice cracks, just the tiniest bit. “I want to be free of this pain.”

She doesn’t know if he’s talking to her or to Han. Maybe both of them.

_Ren, stop. You can’t do this._

“I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.” She watches his hands rise, as if they were her own, offering up the saber to Han.

“Will you help me?”

Han’s face is—oh, it’s heartbreaking, that stubborn, old hope.

“Yes, anything,” he breathes.

On the surface, in some vague notion of reality, Rey tries to cry out to Han to warn him. _You won’t leave here alive!_ She feels the tang of the words on her tongue, quavering with the need to spill out into the abyss. But they’re aborted in her throat; Ren’s pulled her back down into their headspace.

_Fucker._

The saber is between Han and Ren, or Han and her. It’s the same thing, really, the cold, metallic weight of it as real as if it were in her own hands, though these are bigger hands, paler ones, with long fingers that look like they were made for more tender things than the treason they’re about to commit.

 

In the desperate moments before, she shows him the memories of Han that he has. The good ones. The simple ones, the scraps of time so repeated thin and faded by use that the brightness of them has been worn translucent. But they are tangible, and they are real, stored in a place that Ren has long forgotten. Memories so old that they’re not even of real places anymore, just a colorful pastiche of feelings that might have happened once. Ren hopes they did; The musk of bark, Han’s spice smell. His father’s hair, fistfuls of it in Ben’s hands when he rode on his shoulders. Chewie’s coarse hair, too. Crooked smiles. A blackness, a _kind,_ velvety blackness, peppered with points of light that his father named for him, glowing with a kind of indomitable pride:

_Look, kid! That’s goddamn space!_

 

Ren screams in pain.

 _Oh no gods that’s worse, so much_ worse _,_ he moans, nearly bucking Rey right out of his consciousness as he writhes. _Please stop please make it stop don’t think I can do this all on my own I can’t I can’t—_

The turbulence is dizzying, and Rey can’t stop Ren’s hands tense as they tense around the saber where he and Han share it between them; this is it. He’s pushing her away with all he has. That ugly, enormous loneliness so like her own, that little boy who breaks her heart across a thousand faults--

 

_No. I will not leave._

The words, the resolve, they’re coming from that hard little kernel, the scavenger’s core of her, and they become true as she says them. Maybe it’s just the contrary nature of her gut reaction to rejection, but Rey will not be pushed away, not when so much is at stake. She is scrappy and hardy and resilient, desert-daughter, and despite what Ren might think, it’s not that easy to tear her out of his mind by the roots. No matter how much she might resist it, it’s undeniable now: she runs deeply in him. So here she’ll stay.

Rey tenses around the bond, and then with one great heave, pushes in so far that she feels as if she’s up to her armpits in the ashy sludge of Ren’s discontent.

She finds him, there, at the bottom, and grips his shivering form tight.

 

 _You don’t have to do it, not all on your own._ She says, and it feels right. _I’m strong. I can help you bear the weight._

Kylo Ren is a terrible human being, but at the center of it all there's the truth that he's _real_ , Rey realizes, drowning under the weight of his own bitter self-hatred, the sour tang of insecurity.

So with one great heave, a movement so bone-grindingly difficult that it might have made the planet move, she brings him up for air.

He’s exposed, naked, tiny and shivering with that impermeable cold. So she shines down on him, trying to warm him with nothing but the old, abstract ways that she knows. She whispers the dry heat of high noon across him, spins him sandy fables that shed dust into everything they touch. She blankets him in the sound the of the blaze, the endless white waves of dune after dune after dune on into the shimmering horizon, and then past it into places that she’s only seen in dreams.

 

 _Look_ , she murmurs into the space above his collar bone, another truth rolling in on the back of a heat wave _. This hell, it made me. My heart is strong enough for you both._

And so it is.

Dimly, Rey is aware of Ren’s relaxing grip on the saber. Her shoulders sag with the weight of her relief, and she clutches him close, unable to speak.

 

The wave is black and smooth, very clearly from an alien mind—it has none of the interesting texture of Ren’s darkness, none marbled ribbons of gold that make it so distinct to him. It’s that absolute-zero feeling again, and it’s here to take him from her. All at once Ren’s inundated, pulled under by the ink of it. A rip tide so cold, it gives her freezer burn where it touches her arms. Gone.

 

She’s back on her knees, back in the world, and _what_ —but she has no time: The blade is so, so red where it goes through Han’s back with a sizzle, a beacon in the darkness of the oscillator.

His body is so, so small as it falls into that omniscient blue, the bottomlessness of infinity.

 

Han Solo is dead.

 

The universe had seemed to slow for those few seconds, just to fuck with her, and now it resumes with a pace so brutal that it whips at her cheeks. She doesn’t even have a sound to make. Chewie cries out, and Ren is crippled by his bowcaster, kneeling into the metal of the catwalk. Stormtroopers crawl out of the woodwork and the oscillator becomes a battleground. Finn positively _roars_ at her side, shaking the metal of the guardrail with both hands in grief. But, there, through her numbness and the hail of blaster fire, the dark figure looks odd; _what’s he doing?_ One hand on his side, Ren is reaching up to her with the other.

“REY!”

Strange, it doesn’t sound like anger, too broken for that. It sounds like a war—

Snoke. The black wave, the terrible presence, is called Snoke. It presses her down with a force like a neutron star, every square inch of her condensed into an impossibly tiny space, and she feels wetness on her cleft and lips and chin; her nose is bleeding with the force of him. The sub-zero darkness had climbed up the fertile braid of their bond, from Ren to her, like some sort of infectious disease.

Down, down, she’s forced, sapped limbs being corralled into new shapes, mind squeezed and fondled by this violating presence, twin to Ren in his pain.

She’s losing all dimension, any sense of time or space, save for Snoke, but _ah. Alright._

Rey has fought it. Rey has fought everything. Even through the pain of the bond, the disorientation of being tied to Ren, Rey has not _stopped_ fighting since she woke up in those manacles at that distant place, a time that feels like years ago. She has just watched her only father die, and she can't. She just can't. Her mind and fists, her very will, are numb with the exhaustion of the struggle, and there's no strength left to lift her head to take the blows with defiance any longer. 

Rey sags against the darkness, the frost; She has fought, and though Jakku taught her how to do that, it also told her this, at the base of all things:

Sometimes, it is best to give up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok sure this is RIFE with mistakes but oh well. also too late to realizes that rewriting what is essentially the climax of the film is kind of a shitty idea but w/e


End file.
